The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Computer Science,
#2151
Julia Grout
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Julia Grout was the Chairman of the Women's Department of Health and Physical Education at Duke University from 1924 to 1964. She was the first director of the physical education department in Duke Women's college.
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Edmonia Lewis
1844 - 1907 (63 years)
Mary Edmonia Lewis, also known as "Wildfire" , was an American sculptor, of mixed African-American and Native American heritage. Born free in Upstate New York, she worked for most of her career in Rome, Italy. She was the first African-American and Native American sculptor to achieve national and then international prominence. She began to gain prominence in the United States during the Civil War; at the end of the 19th century, she remained the only Black woman artist who had participated in and been recognized to any extent by the American artistic mainstream. In 2002, the scholar Molefi Ke...
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Hertha Ayrton
1854 - 1923 (69 years)
Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor, and suffragette. Known in adult life as Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripple marks in sand and water.
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Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an American artist of African-American and Native American ancestry, known for her sculpture. She was the first African-American graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1918 and later studied at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the early 1920s. She became noted for her work in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1934, Prophet began teaching at Spelman College, expanding the curriculum to include modeling and history of art and architecture. Prophet died in 1960 at the age of 70.
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Theresa Pollak
1899 - 2002 (103 years)
Theresa Pollak was an American artist and art educator born in Richmond, Virginia. She was a nationally known painter, and she is largely credited with the founding of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts. She was a teacher at VCU's School of the Arts between 1928 and 1969. Her art has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. She died at the age of 103 on September 18, 2002 and was given a memorial exhibition at Anderson Gallery of Virginia Commonwealth University.
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Shirley Carew Titus
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Shirley Carew Titus was a nurse educator at the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. Titus was the executive director of the California Nurses' Association from 1942 until 1956. She successfully advocated for and achieved the first collective bargaining for nurses. In 1982, Titus was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame. She died on March 21, 1967. She was survived by her sister, Adele B. Titus.
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Sibyl M. Rock
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
Sibyl Martha Rock was an American inventor who was a pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing. Rock was a key person in Consolidated Engineering Corporation's mass spectrometry team at a time when mass spectrometers were first being commercialized for use by researchers and scientists. Rock was instrumental in developing mathematical techniques for analyzing the results from mass spectrometers, in developing an analog computer with Clifford Berry for analysis of equations, and in sustaining an ongoing dialog between engineers and customers involved in development of both the mass spectrome...
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Sofonisba Anguissola
1535 - 1625 (90 years)
Sofonisba Anguissola , also known as Sophonisba Angussola or Sophonisba Anguisciola, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family. She received a well-rounded education that included the fine arts, and her apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art. As a young woman, Anguissola traveled to Rome where she was introduced to Michelangelo, who immediately recognized her talent, and to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. The Spanish queen, Elizabeth of Valois, was a keen amateur painter and in 1559 Anguissola was recruited to go to Madrid as her tutor, with the rank of lady-in-waiting.
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Kathleen Allen
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Kathleen Saywell Allen was a British painter, muralist, designer and art teacher. Allen is known for her urban landscapes and, in particular, scenes depicting post-war rebuilding in London. Biography Allen was born in the Chiswick area of London and, due to a prolonged childhood illness, was home-schooled until she was 14 years old, when she attended Bromley Country School for Girls between 1920 and 1924. Eventually she enrolled in the Royal College of Art. Upon graduating from the RCA in 1928, Allen taught art in a number of schools in London and the Midlands before spending time painting murals in Kent and Warwickshire.
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Anna Morandi Manzolini
1714 - 1774 (60 years)
Anna Morandi Manzolini was an internationally known anatomist and anatomical wax modeler, as lecturer of anatomical design at the University of Bologna. Life Morandi was born in 1714 in Bologna, Italy. She was raised in a traditional home where marriage, children, and a domestic lifestyle were natural choices for women. Women were expected to be wives, raise their children and essentially tend to their husbands needs and wants. This wasn’t the case for Anna Morandi. She became a wife and had children, but instead of tending to her husband, she worked side by side with him. In 1736, Morandi ma...
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Paula Modersohn-Becker
1876 - 1907 (31 years)
Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German Expressionist painter of the late 19th and early 20th century. She is noted for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. She is considered one of the most important representatives of early expressionism, producing more than 700 paintings and over 1000 drawings during her active painting life. She is recognized both as the first known woman painter to paint nude self-portraits, and the first woman to have a museum devoted exclusively to her art . Additionally, she is considered to be the first woman artist to depict her...
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Matilda Ellen Bishop
1842 - 1913 (71 years)
Matilda Ellen Bishop was the first Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London and was responsible for establishing many of the early traditions at the institution. Her father was a scholarly Church of England clergyman.
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Cecilia Beaux
1855 - 1942 (87 years)
Eliza Cecilia Beaux was an American artist and the first woman to teach art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Known for her elegant and sensitive portraits of friends, relatives, and Gilded Age patrons, Beaux painted many famous subjects including First Lady Edith Roosevelt, Admiral Sir David Beatty and Georges Clemenceau.
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Harriet George Barclay
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Harriet George Barclay was an American botanist, plant ecologist, nature conservationist, and artist. Biography Barclay was a professor at the University of Tulsa. She later became Chair of the Botany Department in 1953.
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Emma Montgomery McRae
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Emma Montgomery McRae was a Professor of English literature. Born Mary Emma Montgomery in Loveland, Ohio, she was the daughter of William Montgomery and Anna née Newton. Her family moved to Indiana when she was five. Emma completed her undergraduate work at Brookfield Academy, Indiana, then she taught at a school in Vevay, Indiana.
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Helen Binyon
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Helen Francesca Mary Binyon was a British artist and writer. She was also a watercolour painter, an illustrator and a puppeteer. Biography Binyon was born in Chelsea in London, her father being the poet and scholar Laurence Binyon, and was educated at St Paul's Girls' School. Helen Binyon studied at the Royal College of Art, RCA, between 1922 and 1926 where she was taught by Paul Nash and her fellow pupils included Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. After spending some time at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, Binyon studied engraving at the Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1928 to 1930.
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Catharine Carter Critcher
1868 - 1964 (96 years)
Catharine Carter Critcher was an American painter. A native of Westmoreland County, Virginia, she worked in Paris and Washington, D.C. before becoming, in 1924, a member of the Taos Society of Artists, the only woman ever elected to that body. She was a long time member of the Arts Club of Washington.
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Varvara Stepanova
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Varvara Fyodorovna Stepanova was a Russian artist. With her husband Alexander Rodchenko, she was associated with the Constructivist branch of the Russian avant-garde, which rejected aesthetic values in favour of revolutionary ones. Her activities extended into propaganda, poetry, stage scenery and textile designs.
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Djuna Barnes
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood , a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
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Margaret Garland
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Margaret Vallis Mary Lester Garland was a British artist known as a painter of landscapes and figure subjects. Biography Garland was born in Oxford and attended the Royal College of Art design school between 1925 and 1927. There she met Helen Binyon and they became lifelong friends. After graduating from the Royal College she began to exhibit with the New English Art Club and also received a commission to create a mural for the Holy Trinity Church in Bath. The mural was completed but destroyed by bombing during World War II. After the War, Garland remained in Bath where she taught at the Bat...
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Elizabeth Gould
1804 - 1841 (37 years)
Elizabeth Gould, née Coxen , was a British artist and illustrator at the forefront of the natural history movement. Elizabeth traveled and worked alongside her husband, naturalist and author John Gould. She produced illustrations and lithographs for ornithological works, including plates in Darwin's The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle and the Goulds' seminal work The Birds of Australia. In total, Elizabeth is accredited to at least 650 works.
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Lygia Clark
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Lygia Pimentel Lins , better known as Lygia Clark, was a Brazilian artist best known for her painting and installation work. She was often associated with the Brazilian Constructivist movements of the mid-20th century and the Tropicalia movement. Along with Brazilian artists Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Pape and poet Ferreira Gullar, Clark co-founded the Neo-Concrete movement. From 1960 on, Clark discovered ways for viewers to interact with her art works. Clark's work dealt with the relationship between inside and outside, and, ultimately, between self and world.
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Olea Marion Davis
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Olea Marion Davis was a Canadian artist and craftsperson who worked in architecture and decorative art as well as sculpture and pottery. Her sculptural and ceramic work was exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, as well as at the Brussels World Fair in 1958 and the Ostende International Show in 1959. Her architectural commissions include friezes, ornamental grills and screens, and lighting fixtures for locations such as the Hotel Vancouver and Pier B.C. in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
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Sarah A. Worden
1855 - 1918 (63 years)
Sarah A. Worden was an American painter of landscapes and portraits. She was also an art instructor in various schools and for several years, at Mount Holyoke College. Early life and education Sarah Agnes Worden was born in Xenia, Ohio, October 10, 1853.
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Wenonah Bell
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Wenonah Day Bell was an American painter known for depictions of rural life in the southern United States and urban scenes of New York. Bell was a native of Trenton, South Carolina, and the daughter of a Baptist minister. The Bell family lived in numerous small towns throughout the Piedmont region during Bell's childhood. They eventually settling in Gainesville, Georgia, where her father established a ministry.
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Mary C. Whitman
1809 - 1875 (66 years)
Mary C. Whitman was an American educator who served as the second president of Mount Holyoke College from 1849 to 1850. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1839, taught there from 1840 to 1842, and was Associate Principal from 1842 to 1849 before becoming Head.
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Adelaide Hiebel
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Adelaide Hiebel was an artist and illustrator who worked for the Gerlach Barklow Co. in Joliet, Illinois, a manufacturer of art calendars. Hiebel preferred to work in pastels, and was known for her photographic detail and portraits of women, especially "women and dogs, mothers with infants, infant portraits and small children in cute situations."
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Adele Goodman Clark
1882 - 1983 (101 years)
Adele Goodman Clark was an American artist and suffragist. Early life Clark was born in 1882 in Montgomery, Alabama to Robert Clark, a railroad worker originally from Belfast, and Estelle Goodman Clark, a Jewish music teacher originally from New Orleans. She was the sister of fellow suffragist Edith Clark Cowles.
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Elizabeth McCausland
1899 - 1965 (66 years)
Elizabeth McCausland was an American art critic, historian and writer. Early life Elizabeth McCausland was born in Wichita, Kansas, on April 16, 1899. Career A few years after graduating from Smith College , she began working for Springfield Sunday Union and The Springfield Republican, both newspapers based in Springfield, Massachusetts. She became deeply invested in the Sacco-Vanzetti case and eventually compiled a series of articles in a pamphlet called The Blue Menace.
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Christine Moore Howell
1899 - 1972 (73 years)
Christine Moore Howell was a hair care product businesswoman who founded Christine Cosmetics where she formulated her own line of cosmetics and hair care products. She was the head of the New Jersey Board of Beauty Culture Control. She was the first African-American to graduate from Princeton High School.
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Jane Heap
1883 - 1964 (81 years)
Jane Heap was an American publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner , she edited the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. Heap herself has been called "one of the most neglected contributors to the transmission of modernism between America and Europe during the early twentieth century."
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Muriel Sibell Wolle
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Muriel Sibell Wolle, née Muriel Vincent Sibell was an American artist best known for her drawings and paintings of mining communities in the western states. Biography Born in Brooklyn, New York, she graduated from the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1920 with diplomas in advertising and costume design. After graduation, she accepted a teaching position at the Texas State College for Women in Denton, Texas, then served as an instructor in Art at the Parsons School of Design from 1923 to 1926. After a trip to Colorado in 1926, Sibell began looking for a teaching position in the West.
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Eleanor Miller
Eleanor Miller was a teacher and state legislator in California. A Republican, she was the fifth woman elected to the California legislature. She was elected in 1922, 1924, 1926, 1928, 1930, 1932, 1934, 1936, and 1940. She founded the Eleanor Miller School of Expression. She wrote the memoir When Memory Calls about her life, including her travels to Europe and the Near East. The book includes pen drawings by Lewis D. Johnson.
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Elisabeth Blochmann
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Elisabeth Blochmann was a scholar of education, as well as of philosophy, and a pioneer in and researcher of women's education in Germany. Life Born in 1892 as the first child of the public prosecutor Dr. Heinrich Blochmann and his wife Anna née Sachs into an assimilated German-Jewish upper-middle-class family, Elisabeth grew up in the then Grand Ducal capital of Weimar, where she attended the upper girls' school, was certified as an assistant nurse, and qualified as a teacher. Serving as a nurse at a lazarett in Weimar during the first year of World War I, and then for two years as a teacher...
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Alexandra Illmer Forsythe
1918 - 1980 (62 years)
Alexandra Winifred Illmer Forsythe was an American computer scientist best known for co-authoring a series of computer science textbooks during the 1960s and 1970s, including the first ever computer science textbook, Computer Science: A First Course, in 1969.
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Natalie Enright Jerger
Natalie Dana Enright Jerger is an American computer scientist known for research in computer science including computer architecture and interconnection networks. Education and career Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, she attended Kent Place School and received a BS in computer engineering from Purdue University in 2002. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Computer Architecture.
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Joyce Currie Little
Joyce Currie Little was an American computer scientist, engineer, and educator. She was a professor and chairperson in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University in Towson, Maryland.
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Katie Atkinson
Katie Marie Atkinson is a professor of computer science and the Dean of the School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. She works on researching and building artificial intelligence tools to help judges and lawyers. Atkinson previously served as the President of the International Association for AI and Law.
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Anna Meredith
1900 - Present (126 years)
Anna Louise Meredith is Professor of Conservation Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where she has previously served as chairperson of zoological conservation medicine at the Royal School of Veterinary Studies.
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Heloise Hersey
1855 - Present (171 years)
Heloise Edwina Hersey was an American scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and literature. A graduate of Vassar College and the first female professor of Anglo-Saxon studies in the United States, she was appointed at Smith College in 1878.
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Ruth Stokes
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
Ruth Wyckliffe Stokes was an American mathematician, cryptologist, and astronomer. She earned the first doctorate in mathematics from Duke University, made pioneering contributions to the theory of linear programming, and founded the Pi Mu Epsilon journal.
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May Lansfield Keller
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
May Lansfield Keller was a college professor and dean. Born in Baltimore, Maryland to Wilmer Lansfield Keller and Jeanie née Simonton, May Lansfield Keller received an early private school education at the Little Dames' School in the Baltimore area. From 1888 to 1894, she studied at the Girls' Latin School, then matriculated to Goucher College in 1894. She joined Pi Beta Phi, and would remain active in the sorority past her graduation in 1898. At this point she became interested in taking graduate studies in Germany, but her father was opposed so she instead enrolled at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1898.
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Agnes Meyer Driscoll
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Agnes Meyer Driscoll , known as "Miss Aggie" or "Madame X'", was an American cryptanalyst during both World War I and World War II and was known as "the first lady of naval cryptology." Early years Born Agnes May Meyer in Geneseo, Illinois, in 1889, Driscoll moved with her family to Westerville, Ohio, in 1895 where her father, Gustav Meyer, had taken a job teaching music at Otterbein College. In 1909, he donated the family home to the Anti-Saloon League, which had recently moved its headquarters to Westerville. The home was later donated to the Westerville Public Library and is now home to the...
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1860 - 1935 (75 years)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman , also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was an American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, advocate for social reform, and eugenicist. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.
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Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
1875 - 1942 (67 years)
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was an American sculptress, art patron and collector, and founder in 1931 of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. She was a prominent social figure and hostess, who was born into the wealthy Vanderbilt family and married into the Whitney family.
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Gwen Lux
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Gwen Lux Creighton professionally Gwen Lux, was an American sculptor known for her abstraction and frequently constructed from polyester resin concrete and metals. She was among America's pioneer women sculptors.
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Camille Claudel
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Camille Rosalie Claudel was a French sculptor known for her figurative works in bronze and marble. She died in relative obscurity, but later gained recognition for the originality and quality of her work. The subject of several biographies and films, Claudel is well known for her sculptures including The Waltz and The Mature Age.
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Artemisia Gentileschi
1596 - 1654 (58 years)
Artemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter. Gentileschi is considered among the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists, initially working in the style of Caravaggio. She was producing professional work by the age of 15. In an era when women had few opportunities to pursue artistic training or work as professional artists, Gentileschi was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and she had an international clientele.
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Eva Hesse
1936 - 1970 (34 years)
Eva Hesse was a German-born American sculptor known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. She is one of the artists who ushered in the postminimal art movement in the 1960s.
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Lee Krasner
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and visual artist active primarily in New York. She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federa...
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